Soilless garden systems that have been manufactured to date work automatically or they work manually. No manual garden's grow tank has ever been designed so that it can be fit into an automatic system's sump tank and likewise, no automatic system's grow tank has ever been designed to operate out of a sump tank. In soilless gardens large enough to produce a large crop of plants, the growing medium used to fill the large area of the grow tank weighs so much that the growing medium must be emptied out of the tank, and the crop harvested to move the grow tank, or to get underneath to the sump tank in order to clean it. Most automatic system's grow tanks have holes in the bottom for water drainage back to the sump tank so they can't be used out of the sump tank and irrigated because of leakage through their bottoms. These large systems also require a large financial investment to try them out. The smaller automatic gardens are generally too small to produce enough plants to offset their high cost and in order to expand your system you would have to purchase additional self-contained gardens.